Gutter Tactics (Dig)

Dalek | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (January 27, 2009)
• Original Release Date: 2009
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Ipecac Recordings
• ASIN: B001KKRD68
• In-Print Editions: Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #152,905 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ambient noise recalling that of Mogwai is hip-hoplified a la Public Enemy. --Spin.com

They've created a hip-hop masterpiece. Atonal, dissonant and majestic. --Under The Radar

...an incantatory power...the social Armageddon the rapper prophesies may never happen, but the group's caustic music conjures it with persuasive force. --The Washington Post

Product Description

Gutter Tactics

"I think we're moving forward further and further into the back of our minds," reflects producer okt0pus, one half of hip-hop duo dälek (pronounced dial-ekt). With the group's fifth album, Gutter Tactics, dälek has closely packed intensity with consistency, rallying banks of saturated grit over the fractured insistence of New Jersey's boom-bap bricks.

"Our debut EP Negro Necro Nekros and From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots were about us starting out, sometimes getting sounds more than songs," says okt0pus. "Absence was the book on how extreme you could go. Abandoned Language had more ambient moments, and was the end of that chapter of writing it all either heavy or mellow. Gutter Tactics is more us continually doing some early hip-hop shit but with the attitude of the Melvins or Black Sabbath."

Not that dälek has ever been anything but hip-hop, even as the group claims contemporaries from Techno Animal to Mobb Deep, Kevin Martin's the Bug to Isis. A group whose intense lyrics would clear the air even as its sonic density threatened to clear the room, dälek has spent a decade-plus voraciously consuming leftfield influences and spitting out sonic altercations that have seen the group garner tremendous European support even as dälek stays true to its members' East Coast origins.

"I've always just said that it's hip-hop, because that's my culture - everything I do is hip-hop," says dälek, the group's namesake MC. "And more than that it's a philosophy on how music is made, it's the philosophy of diggin' through crates to find sounds you make your own regardless of genre. Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk, while we draw on the essence of Faust, or My Bloody Valentine..."

For Gutter Tactics, however, dälek drew from more than just a cultural, spiritual and philosophical home. Having spent the last two years building a commercial studio by hand, the group similarly constructed Gutter Tactics from the ground up on newly minted home turf, surrounded by patch bays of analog and digital means located just outside the Lincoln Tunnel in Union City.

"Since I started my `studio' was always my bedroom, and now I live nine blocks away from the space," says dälek. "There is no rolling out of bed and working on shit right there, but I like the fact that I need to motivate. I was always making beats constantly, but it's nice to have that provision - 1000 square feet of playground that inspires me to work even harder."

Once the beats were collected, okt0pus invited members of the group's Deadverse massive into the studio, laying down sample banks of ghosting tones from musicians such as Destructo Swarmbots, recorded while tweaking effects live to erase any human performance element. Absence could be equated to a Glenn Branca aggregation of harmonic mêlées and atonality pushed so far it verges on pop, and Abandoned Language approached a British-style hypnotism of encompassing more than overly aggravated passages. The 11 tracks of Gutter Tactics, however, work off the immediate grid, lyrics and loops informed by arena-ready dynamics and electronic addling. The sound marches forward even as it pays tribute to a time when Gang Starr fans wore Bad Brains t-shirts and the Bomb Squad could make Slayer seem childish.

Old school compression tricks were then used to slam the shit out of signals, driving things into the red, getting sludge to keep it from being empty, soulless, overly focused. "I'd rather have that David Lynch lighting - shadowy, claustrophobic, but shoved with detail," says okt0pus.

"This album isn't pummeling you, though," observes okt0pus. "It's got that heavy, but it takes a few listens to realize just how substantial it is. We were guilty in the beginning of having everything so focused and compressed, and this record shows you can still be loud and retain the room dimensions that make records really great to hear."

Lyrically, the socio-politically minded Gutter Tactics is equally measured and insurgent. "I don't make records for shock value ... this is a collection of who I am at this point and what I see around me, so it's a dark album, full of anger, maybe some fear, and also hope. It's the state of the world where I, where we are at right now. I just think in America it's not always as safe to speak truth anymore. So, while our music may be abstract, I want the thought process to be more straightforward.

"Except maybe this album's title," concludes dälek. "Instead of having an absolute meaning the title `Gutter Tactics' is about the overall feel. It's an album that's raw, heavy, but full of clarity."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gutter Tactics, January 27, 2009

By 

Mike Newmark (Tarzana, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Gutter Tactics (Dig) (Audio CD)

The hip-hop heads who follow the genre as closely as high rollers watch a horse race might have other ideas, but for my money Dälek (pronounced "DYE-a-leck") was responsible for the best--and most depressing--rap song of 2007. Over 10 minutes in length, the title track from Abandoned Language channeled a world of depravity in the muted wail comprising half of the song's melody, looped and sustained into oblivion. What begins as "typical" hip-hop fare sprawls upward and outward as bricks pile atop others and the instruments steadily crush everything beneath them, but not before Okt0pus and Dälek (the MC after whom the duo is named) have their way with words. Amidst their scary, surrealistic street poetry, delivered in a low bark burning with steely resentment, one very direct line stands out: "Six-hundred years, ain't a ******* thing different." And then, just as this thought is allowed to sink in, the raps fragment and dissolve and the music picks up their slack, conveying in sounds what Dälek and Okt0pus cannot express in language.

Taking the song's trademark aphorism absolutely literally is missing the point. Of course society has progressed since the Middle Ages, but as for us as human beings, well, the story isn't quite as flattering, is it? We've gathered from historical accounts, art, and literature that the roots of humankind grew from seeds of violence and vilification, neither of which has ever really gone away--only changed form. People still kill people. There's still a palpable discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots. Narcissism powers the engines that drive many of us to our goals. Dälek have treated these judgments as mere observations in their decade-long career, throughout which they appeared to have only become angrier and more focused, as well as more lyrically concrete: who has time for alliteration when someone's just been murdered on the corner of the block? The ingeniousness of the Dälek project, however, lies and may always lie in the overwhelming sheets of sound that throw the two staples of hip-hop (beats and rhymes) into the back seat when they're simply not powerful enough to send the message. Stuffed with noise, mutilated by pedals and after-effects, and layered with instrumental drones both tempered and insane, the music is a poignant retranslation of their worldviews and a hell of a statement in itself--one that describes the gangs of Dälek's home state of New Jersey as much as it does the ugly primordial soup out of which we arose well over 600 years ago.

This sort of racket that Dälek deals in has led the lazy among us to label the group as "alternative" and stop there, without plumbing the possibilities of what they're ultimately trying to do. By now it's well known that they've toured with Isis, collaborated with Faust, and share more sonic signifiers with the Melvins than Madvillain. They're also experimental in a real sense, fiddling with recording techniques and setting their sights on a different aesthetic each time out; they conceptualized Absence as "the book" on extremity, Abandoned Language tried ambience on for size, and so on. Even more than experimentation, however, Dälek have been all about the continual exploration and perfection of a single idea: that even within a decidedly hip-hop framework, music can speak volumes when words feel inadequate. And Gutter Tactics, their fifth album proper, provides perhaps the clearest expression of their intentions yet.

Louder, viler, and grittier than its predecessor, Gutter Tactics grew out of recording sessions played by the Deadverse Massive, a shadowy collective of noise artists closely affiliated with the duo. As the musicians whaled on their instruments, Okt0pus and Dälek modified their sounds in real time, ostensibly as a way to excise all the audible humanity from them. Indeed, the backgrounds don't give the impression that they were played by humans, but rather occurred naturally, spewed forth from a hole in the earth or dropped from flying aircraft. After the infamous Reverend Wright gives an incendiary speech condemning Americans' role in terrorism during "Blessed Are They Who Bash Your Children's Head Against a Rock", "No Question" continues the onslaught with a muck-laden diatribe whose drums stomp threateningly beneath the noise of a thousand melting pianos. The even uglier "Armed with Krylon" trades the pianos in for an army of motorcycles splattering Black Sabbath-begotten sludge onto an extraterrestrial hip-hop beat, the way Paik might sound had they been produced by Dan the Automator. El-P is really the only contemporary hip-hop artist working in the same arena, but Dälek deliberately eschew El's swiftness for the "heavy" that they seemed to have kept in their crosshairs since Gutter Tactics` inception. Nowhere is this truer than the eight-minute "Who Medgar Evers Was...", a trudge through a swamp with concrete boots that dares you to complete it.

It's a remarkably exhausting listen from end to end. The raps are stylistically pedestrian and the beats rarely deviate from a leaden 4/4 thud, but this often works in Dälek's favor, since it allows ample latitude for the music to get pushed to front and center. One notable exception to the norm is "Los Macheteros / Spear of a Nation", whose beats consist almost entirely of shotgun blasts. From M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" to Terror Danjah's "Cock Back V1.2", the purpose of gunshots-as-beats has primarily been to rally and galvanize, but the ones here are uncommonly defeatist. In another context their rhythm could've been reggaeton, but they've been stretched and slowed into un-danceability, and as the track progresses the sad, sad melody continues to engulf them until the music and the shots' echoes become virtually indistinguishable. The verses, too, get bulldozed into the back of the mix, and while it's often difficult to understand them, they're clearly stewing with pent-up rage and seem to be escalating toward something enormous. The duo's alarming poeticism--heard more sharply on Abandoned Language--is missed, but underneath the music's thick substances the tone of Dälek's lyrics (both attitudinal and timbral) makes perfect sense.

If this approach sounds suspiciously like shoegaze, it may be vindicating to know that My Bloody Valentine has remained a spiritual influence on the group, and that Loveless is a perennial favorite of Dälek the MC. (In a 2005 interview with Pitchfork he called it "one of the most beautiful records I've ever heard".) Strange to imagine that the paths of the transcendently gorgeous MBV and the generally repellant Dälek should cross, though there are moments--"We Lost Sight" and "A Collection of Miserable Thoughts Laced with Wit" among them--when the line between ugliness and beauty on Gutter Tactics becomes extraordinarily thin. The strongest link between the two acts, however, bypasses the level of sound into the realm of philosophy. If shoegaze is all about surrendering blissfully to the elements, then Gutter Tactics turns this experience right on its head. Okt0pus can barely get through two verses in the closer "Atypical Stereotype" before he malfunctions, becoming locked on the phrase "Truths stay intangible, they treat us like animals" and then giving way to the music's chloroforming weight. It's a singularly affecting instance in an album full of them, in which Dälek reluctantly, ambivalently, confusedly, and perhaps fearfully submit to forces they know are far greater than themselves.

The record's crowning achievement may be how truthfully Dälek convey this ambivalence through music, and in so doing, capture the spirit of a world where tragedy looms overhead, where hate is scarily effective, and where the victim and the victimizer are often the same person. Whether these negative forces attack us from the outside or grip us from within, they're too huge and amorphous to fight against on our own, and Dälek seem to realize it. Another line from "Abandoned Language" comes to mind here: "I say I'll keep a pen to pad and fingers on triggers / Should I aim it on the temple or several? Can't figure". Gutter Tactics gets Dälek--and maybe us by proxy--no closer to answering this question, for as traumatic as these musical passages are to swallow, it's unclear whether they signify a cocked weapon or a white flag. Yet this fully realized artistic expression of confusion is as deft a statement as we're apt to get from a duo that's been searching for years to discover the tortured voice in their voicelessness.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sludge-hop for a dark era, January 27, 2009

By 

Nick - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gutter Tactics (Dig) (Audio CD)

Dalek is a group that finds themselves in a very unusual position.all too often they garner criticism from the hip hop community for being too noisy, having long songs, and not adhering to the gangster rap stereotypes. On the other hand, your typical metal and rock fan will most likely ignore this because of their involvement in the hip hop genre. Despite these musical prejudices, Dalek has found an audience with more varied tastes, attracting audiences who enjoy hip-hop and rock, but also have a taste for post-rock and experimental electronic music.

Dalek's latest album, Gutter Tactics, revisits some of the trademarks that the group established on their 2005 album "Absence" but still manages to be a logical followup to their 2007 album "Abandoned Language". Lyrically, "Gutter Tactics" continues Dalek's tradition of addressing social and political topics. MC dalek manages to combine gritty, inner-city rapping, collegiate-level English and prose poetry to weave dark tales of social injustice and violence. Dalek's lyricism is highly original and well-crafted and gives the listener a lot to digest. The lyrics never fall into gangster-rap cliches and inane dance-floor one-liners. Instead, the lyrics tackle such topics as racism and oppression, but are spoken with a nuance that other political rappers seem to dispense with entirely.

"Gutter Tactics" manages to combine the harsh distortion of the group's 2005 album "Absence" the orchestral,spacey vibe of Dalek's last album "Abandoned Language". The album's sound is uncompromising and dense, with melodies buried deep within the mix. The music is the least hip-hop sounding hip hop I've ever heard but there are beats and they do make sense.
Every track is dark and violent, with many sounds piled on top of each other. Each track is jam-packed with distorted samples and electronics, creating a wall of sound that's more akin to old-school industrial and noise music than it is to Kanye West. A few of the tracks also feature slow, metallic guitar samples that sound as if they took great inspiration from the black and doom metal bands that can be found on the Southern Lord label. Occasionally the tracks incorporate uneasy, droning ambiance that offer respite from the onslaught, but they still give the listener the same sense of dread the rest of the album does. The only criticism to be made of this album is that the music sometimes becomes too loud to hear the lyrics. There's many insightful and educational verbalizations throughout the disc's length but many of them can't be heard because of the overpowering nature of the music. This aside, "Gutter Tactics" is an intense, powerful and highly intelligent rap disc that seems to look to past efforts for inspiration while expanding upon Dalek's sonic arsenal. This album will more likely appeal to fans of early industrial, drone/sludge/doom metal, and dark ambient music than it will appeal to fans of the current hip-hop establishment.

5.0 out of 5 stars Superbly exquisite, September 24, 2009

By 

Jason Harrington "Trucker Hater Magazine" (Little Rock, AR) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Gutter Tactics (Dig) (Audio CD)

Dalek have been working this formula for some time, and this is no departure, but clearly a very refined specimen. Some fans might find this to be too organized, but I'm afraid those people got the wrong idea. This is where the My-Blody-Valentine-meets-Public-Enemy formula channels it's angry snarl closer to a real John Cage inspired breed of hip hop. Very specific and not in search of it's own sound anymore.